Oakland’s Reins Blister a Mayor Raised on Protest

Wednesday

For Mayor Jean Quan, a longtime civil rights activist and former union organizer, the possibility of being undone by youthful demonstrators poses a painful paradox.

OAKLAND, Calif. — Days after Jean Quan was elected mayor in the fall of 2010, the Oakland police put a wheel clamp on her silver Prius while it was parked outside City Hall. She cursed her husband for not paying the family’s parking tickets and braced for the embarrassing news articles.

So it began: the rookie year from hell. In May, the city attorney quit, lambasting City Hall as being corrupt. In October, the police chief followed suit, complaining about micromanagement. In November, voters rejected a tax that Ms. Quan had advocated to help fix a budget shortfall. December brought new talk that all three of Oakland’s professional sports teams might leave for fancier digs.

But the problem that has really besieged Ms. Quan, the first woman and first Asian-American to be the city’s mayor, has been the Occupy Oakland movement, which in October turned a grassy plaza in front of City Hall into a muddy staging ground for anticorporate protests.

In a dizzying series of reversals, Ms. Quan initially embraced the protest, then ordered the camp cleared, then allowed the demonstrators to return after the police seriously injured one of them, a Marine veteran. Two weeks later, she ordered the plaza cleared again, citing reports that “anarchists” were fomenting violence.

Now, Frank H. Ogawa Plaza remains empty most days, but Ms. Quan’s mayoralty is teetering. In a city known for its flamboyant and colorful mayors, she has emerged as one of its most controversial. Conservatives accuse her of coddling the protesters, while former allies on the left are incensed that she ordered the plaza cleared at all.

And now two rival groups, one started by a black community activist, the other by a white former mayoral candidate, are vying to have her recalled.

“She should have declared a position and stuck with it,” said Dan Siegel, a longtime friend and adviser who broke with the mayor after the police cleared the plaza the second time but who opposes a recall. “The problem was going back and forth, which wound up making everyone angry with her.”

For Ms. Quan, 62, a longtime civil rights activist and former union organizer whose husband and 29-year-old daughter participated in Occupy protests, the possibility of being undone by youthful demonstrators poses a painful paradox.

To this day, she fondly recalls being “a mouthy little Chinese kid” who chided a dean at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s for threatening to revoke her scholarship because she had posted leaflets calling for a grape boycott on campus. Early in the Occupy campaign, she issued statements saying she endorsed the “pro-99 percent activists.” (Yet when she appeared at a recent panel event with protest organizers, she was loudly heckled.)

In an interview over matzo ball soup, Ms. Quan, who speaks so swiftly that her sentences sometimes tumble into each other, acknowledged sympathies for the protesters. “My background has made it emotionally harder” to order police actions against them, she said. “But I’m the mayor of the city. I have to make decisions based on being the mayor.”

To her critics, Ms. Quan’s ambivalence underscores what they consider her fundamental weakness: she remains, they say, more activist than executive, uncomfortable using police power to maintain order. And in Oakland — which had 90 homicides last year, three times as many as San Diego, despite being one-third the size — public safety is issue No. 1 for many voters.

“Her handling of Occupy was a classic example of her inability to lead,” said Charles Pine, a retiree who is helping to organize one of the recall drives. Or as a former city official put it: “She views herself as part of the group who are giving hell to the man. The problem is she is the man.”

Ms. Quan has had a particularly tense relationship with the police union, which endorsed her main rival for mayor and last month issued a letter calling her handling of the protests “confusing.”

The friction stems partly from her complaint that pay and pensions for the police consume half the city’s general fund budget, leaving little for social programs, parks and public works. Last year, as a city councilwoman, she supported the layoffs of about 100 officers and recruits, though she has hired back more than 50 since becoming mayor.

“I think a lot of police officers feel she doesn’t like them,” said Dominique Arotzarena, president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, which represents about 650 officers.

Critics have also attacked Ms. Quan’s crime-fighting strategy, which emphasizes focusing services as well as police patrols on 100 blocks that account for 90 percent of the city’s most violent crimes. “They think I’m too soft on crime because I want to do the intervention and prevention,” she said. “I just think I’m being smart.”

As for talk that she is indecisive, she bristles. “I do stuff based on data, not on rhetoric,” she said.

Ms. Quan grew up in Livermore, where her father, who died when she was 5, ran a restaurant. Though her family had been in California since the 19th century, she was the first member born in America, because anti-Chinese immigration laws had prevented her grandfathers from bringing their wives to the country.

At Berkeley, she and her future husband, Floyd Huen, helped organize a famous 1969 student strike demanding ethnic studies, then wrote the curriculum for an Asian-American course. The couple spent several years in Manhattan while Mr. Huen attended Yeshiva University’s medical school, then moved to Oakland, where Ms. Quan organized immigrant workers for the Service Employees International Union.

Her political career began almost accidentally in 1989 when, after mobilizing parents to fight the elimination of a school music program, she decided to run for the school board, winning in a Republican stronghold. “It was just sort of a continuation of my activism,” she said.

A 12-year stint on the board was followed by eight years on the City Council. Then came her stunning victory in last year’s 10-candidate mayoral race.

Under the city’s new voting system, which requires voters to rank their preferences, she was the first choice on less than a quarter of the ballots. But when second and third preferences were tallied, she emerged the winner of the four-year term, defeating the favorite, former State Senator Don Perata, by less than two percentage points.

Leonard Raphael, the treasurer of one of the recall committees, said Ms. Quan’s lack of a clear mandate might make her vulnerable. “I’m hoping that wrapping yourself in the mantle of progressivism isn’t good enough anymore if you are incompetent,” he said.

But it is far from clear that the recall groups have the resources to gather the nearly 20,000 signatures needed to put a recall on the ballot next year. They have also failed to coalesce around an alternative candidate — and if the recall question makes the ballot, a mayoral election will be held simultaneously. Mr. Perata has said he will not run.

At the same time, organized labor seems to be lining up behind the mayor, and her friends are beginning to mobilize.

“She is a fierce fighter and very well organized,” said Dick Spees, a former Republican city councilman who is friends with Ms. Quan. “And she will fight it to the end.”

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